August 07

Track	Year	Event	Artist	Song	Album
1.	1782	George Washington orders the creation of the Badge of Military Merit to honor soldiers wounded in battle. It is later renamed to the more poetic Purple Heart.	Combatwoundedveteran	Christ, My Leg is Sore	I Know a Girl Who Develops Crime Scene Photos
2.	1789	The United States War Department is established.	Department	Clearly I Can Now See	War Department
3.	1879	The opening of the Poor Man's Palace in Manchester.	The Pixies	Palace of the Brine	Trompe Le Monde
4.	1909	Alice Huyler Ramsey and three friends become the first women to complete a transcontinental auto trip, taking 59 days to travel from New York City to San Francisco.	SSD	On the Road	Power
5.	1947	Thor Heyerdahl's balsa wood raft the Kon-Tiki, smashes into the reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands after a 101-day, 7,000 kilometres (4,300 mi) journey across the Pacific Ocean in an attempt to prove that pre-historic peoples could have traveled from South America.	The Shins	We Built a Raft and We Floated	Nature Bears a Vaccum
6.	1959	The Lincoln Memorial design on the U.S. penny goes into circulation. It replaces the "sheaves of wheat" design and is still in use.	Penny & the Overtones	What Made You Forget	A Million Dollars Worth of Girl Groups
7.	1974	Philippe Petit performs a high wire act between the twin towers of the World Trade Center 1,368 feet (417 m) in the air.	Dead Boys	High Tension Wire	Young, Loud and Snotty

(Historical facts about August 7 are from Wikipedia.)